Contingent Logic and Practical Orientation of Flexible Criminal Justice Governance in the Age of Misdemeanors

In the era of misdemeanor, in the face of the new requirements of the modernization of social governance and the trend of misdemeanor in China’s current crime situation, the criminal justice response to crime has gradually shifted from focusing on ex post facto punishment and deterrence to focusing on ex ante prevention, multi-party collaboration, deepening the source of accurate governance, and multi-pronged measures combining the concepts of “punishment” and “governance”. The concept of combing “treatment” and “governance” has been transformed. “Effective management of crime in accordance with the law and the strengthening of judicial protection of human rights” are the core tasks of criminal justice management in China. In practice, new thinking and new measures have been demonstrated through the implementation of the policy of “fewer arrests, more cautious prosecutions and more prudent detentions” and the application of the policy of “leniency of guilty pleas and penalties” and “community corrections”. Although “community corrections” and other systems have shown new thinking and new behavior in criminal governance, there are also some problems that contradict the requirements of flexible criminal justice governance and need to be solved urgently. In order to respond positively to the people’s new expectations for fairness and justice and to accurately grasp the balance between the “protection of legal interests” and the “safeguarding of human rights” after a large number of misdemeanors have been criminalized, the administration of criminal justice must explicitly take the “people-oriented” approach as the fundamental principle of crime governance. Criminal justice must clearly take “people-centered” as the fundamental value crime governance, and the concept of “leniency, prudence and moderation” throughout the whole process of crime governance.